practical colour management

[propstuff]

When picking colours from the Attributes pallette (think preparing a Concept presentation), the current system of managing colours is a royal PITA.

On the Mac, the Attributes pallette is a fixed maximum (not very big) size, so you can't get a good idea what the colour will look like "en masse".

The actual swatches are far worse (only a few pixels across) and its completely impossible to judge the colour you're choosing.

Having a "fixed" pallette is a good idea in some ways, but is itself a bit of a PITA. If it must be so, then:

-Different pre built pallettes should be directly accessible from the AP: having to go "somewhere else" to edit them is completely contrary to good human interface design.

-Individual colours of the current pallette should be directly editable from the AP. See above.

- the swatch pallette should be sizable.

-Colour pallettes should be stored in the Library folder not the document, so that they're always available.

This is how I see it working (assuming the resizing thing is fixed):

You click on the Solid colour in the AP, and above the Class colour button in the swatch pallette is a drop menu to select which colour pallette you want to use.

You Right click on an individual swatch, and you go to the colour picker to edit the colour.

Simple Huh?

[Guest]

And reasonable too - other software does it much better and VW needs to improve here

[ThreeDot]

Completely agree propstuff's comments. He mentions color for presentation, but a better color picker would be super for regular drawings as well. I have trouble quickly selecting the correct color because the swatches are too small and there is no way to identify them other than counting columns and rows.

- Colors should also be identifiable by color ID, RGB, or other directly in the color picker. Easier to identify.

- Color picker swatches are too small to be usable.

- Agree with propstuff, put color books in a resource folder. Allow them to be imported and exported as a resource.

ThreeDot

[mike m oz]

This is a longstanding wishlist topic that comes up regularly. Vectorworks would be a far richer 'graphic' program if it was addressed.

[Petri]

Hear, hear!

Named colours can be made as gradients - but they work only in 2D. Other named colours can be made as textures - but they work only in 3D. RIPA, indeed, as I think fully solid colours can be made as gradients only with VectorScript.